Doug wrote:
>> A friend of mine - who is no fan of the bombing - had a long chat
>> with an Afghan living in NYC the other day. His wife and kids are
>> still in Kabul, along with the rest of his family. She asked him what
>> he thought of the bombing. He said he supported it.
Well, though, this kind of foreign policy research, where you ask the first person you know personally who comes from there, has some built-in biases. Particularly if you live in New York. The randomly selected Afghan you happen to meet who has made it to New York is not necessarily a "representative sample of 1" of Afghans, whatever his or her personal virtues. Chris makes this point excellently well, by pointing out that the Afghans who escaped to Moscow have different concerns:
>Here in Moscow there are a lot of Afghans .. [they're pissed] at
>Russia for stopping economic aid when the USSR pulled out.
And the Afghans who are making their way into Pakistan right now are yet a different mix. Well, there was a link I was looking for, but I can't find it - I think it might have been a BBC story, with infuriated refugees telling the reporter how furious they were, and even the Pakistani border guard getting angry. But it's a consistent picture:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12142-2001Oct17.html
"'We are getting killed together,' he said. 'The Taliban are Afghans too.'"
Then again if you talk to the people who have not yet made it out, you get an even different set of opinions:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011018/wl/attack_afghan_scene_dc_1.html
``Are we not human beings? If not, then kill us all under the name of terrorists as you (America) are doing precisely that now,'' said a former university professor.
Lou Paulsen